What is the impact of learning on young children?
Our research and observation tells us that as life becomes more complex in the modern world, children need to start off with a certain set of skills that need to be developed at school. There is a whole critique of this approach as well, that believes that schools are repressive. They do have a valid point. Schools can change their approach to learning from being tedious and boring to joyful and encouraging. However, there are a set of competencies that a child can acquire only in his growing age from 0-15, and not beyond that. So learning at a young age is important.
Also, if you read Steven Pinker’s research, it shows that a human being is hard wired for learning. Children as young as a few weeks old respond to patterns of sounds and smells. That is how early our learning begins! So we can safely say that a child comes to school with his/her desire to learn intact – it is the school that switches it off.
Do you believe that there are different learning styles for each individual? Could you tell our readers about some of them, and whether these styles can be incorporated into our classrooms?
Indeed we all have human modalities of learning and preferences and these preferences can be put under three broad categories; bodily kinesthetic, audio and visual. With the theory of multiple intelligences we have added some more. I believe that even when these differences in learning styles exist, we should be careful in making them so individual and unique that children cannot be grouped together and put under one room. If that becomes the case there will be no learning because there will never be enough teachers. At the same time, I also believe that the teacher should open up possibilities to allow for different modalities of learning in the same classroom rather then the insistence that everyone should do the same thing at the samer time. There is space and time available in the class for children to explore different modalities even when the same thing is being taught. When one child might prefer writing an essay answer, another might prefer making a flowchart to explain what he is trying to say, and another still might prefer a drawing, and all of these should be acceptable.
What are your comments on the national curriculum and its exclusion of social ethics as a subject? Should it incorporate social values and norms?
One of the oddest things about our system is that in theory it is immaculate, but when it comes down to implementation there are major problems. You have to understand that the education system in any country is broken down into different aspects; there is the policy level where the curriculum is decided as a set of competencies that is required, and then the syllabus which is a broad outline of how much of each subject is to be taught at each level of education. To support the syllabus we have the textbooks and teacher training. I don’t think changes are required in the curriculum documents or at the policy level. It’s when you come down to teacher training and textbooks that you see a big gap. Teacher training I believe is the lynchpin. This is because you can have a horrible text book, but if you have a trained teacher s/he will know what to do with it. But if you have a great textbook and an untrained teacher, you will still not get the same results.
The problem with the system also is that we have discarded “civics” as a subject and it is not incorporated into the system through enough textbooks. The syllabus is overshadowed by history as a subject and simple day to day things like traffic management and road safety are left out.
